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hnlmorg 3 days ago

I opened that link expecting to be outraged but instead finding myself sympathetic to their solution.

High value transfers should be subject to additional scrutiny to confirm it’s legitimate.

The hard part is making sure you balance that well enough so that you’re protecting against malaise without the bank then becoming a consumer problem themselves.

It will be interesting to see how well this works.

weird-eye-issue 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

They froze tons of accounts without warning, it was not just a matter of setting daily limits

kijin 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The article is unclear about when the freezings took place, but the sentence starting with "By July" seems to suggest that 3 million is the cumulative total of all the accounts that were frozen from January to July. So it probably wasn't a sudden mass freezing, just constant whack-a-mole.

seunosewa 3 days ago | parent [-]

I feel that 3 million is a lot even over a six month period. Over 16,000 accounts per day.

hnlmorg 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It does say those were tied to “mules”, so freezing those accounts is the right course of action.

In fact the last thing you want to do is give criminals warning that you’re going to freeze their accounts. I’d imagine that would be extremely counterproductive for everyone bar those criminals.

ryandrake 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Believed to be tied to "mules" unless their classification method has zero false positives. If it does have false positives then those non-mules have a right to complain.

Muromec 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

They used to just kill without trial those believed to be tied to drug deals too.

hnlmorg 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Everyone has the right to complain about practically anything they want.

But that doesn’t mean that freezing an account suspected of fraud isn’t the right course of action.

Yeah there’s going to be false positives. However that’s precisely why you freeze the account: to allow you time to follow due process and investigation. If you assumed the process was infallible then you wouldn’t need to freeze the account; you would just skip straight to the punishment and remediation stages ;)

kayamon 2 days ago | parent [-]

If all your money vanished tomorrow you'd have a different argument.

> However that’s precisely why you freeze the account: to allow you time to follow due process

Due process comes before the actions.

AlexeyBelov a day ago | parent [-]

> If all your money vanished tomorrow you'd have a different argument.

But that would just mean they are very biased, since they are kind of defending their own money. Right now they are a bit more impartial.

msm_ 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What is the threshold?

If two people accounts were unjustly frozen (and they have to do some work to unlock them), and at the same time two hundred people life savings were saved, would that be OK with you?

I don't know about them, but there are plenty of ways for law enforcement to get mule account numbers. After all that's the whole point - actual criminals don't have to reveal their own identity, instead they convince a "mule" to (knowingly or not) participate in a crime.

weird-eye-issue 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's not actually what happened

They did a crackdown where if the name associated with the phone number on the account didn't match the name on the bank account then they froze it

Also they froze most accounts owned by foreigners with specific visas

It really had nothing at all to do with mule activity, they were using blanket heuristics

Canada 2 days ago | parent [-]

They froze accounts in this situation:

Mr Bob Smith is married to Mrs Alice Smith. The bank has their status as married, which they have been given copies of marriage certificates over and over and over for many years.

Bob works, and Alice is dependant based on Bob's visa.

Bob has an account, Alice has an account, and they also both have credit cards under their own names. Bob and Alice also have joint accounts, where most of the money is, and it is a lot of money, enough that Alice and Bob have "VIP" status at the bank, and they've been good customers for about a decade.

Alice and Bob have recently updated all FATCA, CRS, and whatever other insane bullshit has been asked of them by the bank. Alice and Bob have Thai tax IDs, which the bank also has.

Alice and Bob have cell phones of course, and naturally, the family phones are in the account "Bob Smith"

The bank freezes Alice account.

Alice goes to the bank in person. The bank doesn't unfreeze the account, they demand she change her phone account to be in her name.

Yeah, for real.

Bob isn't happy. He thinks Thais shouldn't rely on these banks and should use cash as much as possible and avoid QR payments as much as possible.

refulgentis 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If I understand correctly*, they froze 3 million accounts tied to 177K mules.

Couldn't find anything that indicated there was a mass freezing of legitimate accounts, or a singular complaint of an incident of that happening.

* Can't copy paste...is the article an image!?

ameliaquining 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Article's not an image, it's regular HTML text content. The site just uses some extremely obnoxious JavaScript that blocks text selection, right-clicking, and the view-source and developer tools keyboard shortcuts. The latter is especially pointless since anyone who knows about those features also knows that they can be accessed via the browser menu, which JavaScript can't block.

hedora 3 days ago | parent [-]

Or, at least in iOS/macOS, just take a screenshot, then select the text from there.

miohtama 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45241082

pjc50 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very difficult to freeze three million accounts with no false positives.

debugnik 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> is the article an image!?

I can't check right now, but I'm guessing they set `user-select: none` in CSS.

mystraline 3 days ago | parent [-]

About that.

A browser is a 'User agent', as in it is supposed to act on MY behalf, and things in my intent and benefit. Similar agents are real estate agents, or attorneys as my agent.

So... For something that is MY agent, why are browsers creating, and instituting anti-agent choices against my will?

Barring excuses of "following the spec", I should be able to easily disable my user-agent's execution of said onerous code.

(I'm ignoring this for Google chrome. They're an adtech company, and they won in court as a monopoly. Fuck them.)

nofriend 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sometimes not being able to select is useful. You can trivially create a user style that overrides user-select: none if you'd like, something that isn't possible in most gui software.

charcircuit 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>A browser is a 'User agent', as in it is supposed to act on MY behalf

It's supposed to implement the spec. Why are you and many other people on this site so attached over the wording of "user agent"? It is supposed to mean the software making the request, it doesn't mean anything more than that.

ameliaquining 2 days ago | parent [-]

The argument is that the W3C shouldn't have included this feature in the spec, because it (allegedly) prioritizes the interests of publishers who want copy protection over those of end users who want to copy stuff. If true, this would violate the "priority of constituencies" HTML design principle: https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-co...

As it happens, the relevant standard actually includes a response to this argument (https://www.w3.org/TR/css-ui-4/#valdef-user-select-none):

"As user-select is a UI convenience mechanism, not a copy protection mechanism, the UA may provide an alternative way for the user to explicitly select the text even when user-select is none.

Note: none is not a copy protection mechanism, and using it as such is ineffective: User Agents are allowed to provide ways to bypass it, it will have no effect on legacy User Agents that do not support it, and the user can disable it through the user style sheet or equivalent mechanisms on UAs that do anyway. Instead, none is meant to make it easier for the user to select the content they want, by letting the author disable selection on UI elements that are not useful to select. Tools such as CSS validators, linters or in-browser developer tools are encouraged to use heuristics to detect and warn against incorrect or abusive usage that would hamper usability or violate common user expectations."

charcircuit 2 days ago | parent [-]

>If true, this would violate the "priority of constituencies"

Not neccessarily. For example, piracy is so harmful that it could still outway the cost to a user even with a multiplier given to the user's cost. For example the user's cost is 10 and the author's cost is 100. Even with a 5x priority for the user, the needs of the author outweigh it.

Stevvo 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

New customers will be defined as "high-risk" with, a separate classification from "vulnerable" which is for under 15s and over 65s. The limit for these "high-risk" customers is 50000 baht a day, which is surely going to be inconvenient to deal with if you ever need it, e.g. for medical bills.

ameliaquining 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Medical providers are probably okay with getting paid in 50,000-baht daily installments if necessary?

Ekaros 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

1 344,17 Euro

Which to me seems entirely reasonable limit. Such transactions are relatively rare.

hnlmorg 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The article also said that you can apply to make larger transfers and the process gets approved within a few hours (so basically “same day”.

That means unusual payments like home purchases can be approved. But fraud is significantly harder…at least in theory.

StopDisinfo910 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That’s two months of the country median income. I’m pretty sure medical providers will be okay.

That’s mostly annoying for inter accounts movement if you move money around a bit but I think you would get higher capacity if you are concerned.

nxobject 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Medical bills are usually a lot more reasonable than that in Thailand - we have a competitive healthcare market that’s backstopped by a public hospitals and a public universal healthcare system.

segmondy 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

High value transfer is relative to the person making it. For some people, moving $1k-$5k daily is as normal as it is for a college kid moving $10-$50 daily. Then for some people $10k-$50k is the norm.